SOURCE: A review of "The Foster Brother: A Tale of the War of Chiozza," in The Westminster Review, Vol. XLV, No. 1, March, 1846, pp. 34-54.

Lewes was one of the most versatile men of letters in the Victorian era. A prominent English journalist, he was the founder, with Leigh Hunt, of The Leader, a radical political journal that he edited from 1851 to 1854. He served as the first editor of the Fortnightly Review from 1865 to 1866, a journal which he also helped to establish. Critics often cite Lewes's influence on the novelist George Eliot, to whom he was companion and mentor, as his principal contribution to English letters, but they also credit him with critical acumen in his literary commentary, most notably in his dramatic criticism. In the following excerpt, Lewes harshly criticizes authors of some historical romances for their inclusion of "useless" information and for their failure to capture the...